﻿Vote green ﻿andy brown

Elections have a helpful way of concentrating the minds of politicians. Especially if they lose them or think they might.Just before the last General Election Theresa May made a series of major speeches about how determined she was to deal with unfair zero hours contracts. Her friends in the press printed a whole series of articles about how this showed that it was the Conservatives who cared about workers’ rights. When you read the small print it became clear that what she had committed her party to was to conduct a review into zero hours contracts. She kept her word to the letter. A review was conducted. It discovered that nothing much needed to be done and the pathetic change that emerged from it was that workers on zero hours contracts will get the right to ask their boss to put them on a proper long term reliable one. Weak as dishwater doesn’t even begin to cover it. Cynical betrayal does. If your employer is ruthless enough to put you on a zero hours contract in order to cut costs by denying you all meaningful employment rights including sick pay then I wouldn’t recommend going into their office and asking nicely if you can have a better contract. Asking nicely is already legal and already a very risky thing to do. Zero hours contracts continue to expand and continue to be hugely unequal.After years of crushingly horrible actions like this the Conservatives are desperately worried that they are going to get a pounding in the local elections in May. The current bunch of dithering incompetents who occupy the offices of state in Britain are scared stiff that a big defeat will open up all the huge cracks in the unity of their party that they have been working so hard to try and cover up.They are therefore trying very hard to detoxify their brand before the May elections. That is why a three year pay deal for the NHS has been announced that makes it look as if the pay freeze and the long years of austerity are over. The fact that the deal doesn’t even exceed the current rate of inflation for large numbers of NHS employees is not being heavily spun. The love that the Tories have for the NHS is.Indeed the love of the Conservatives for every part of our nation’s collective socialist NHS system is so strong that they are thinking of reforming the finances of the NHS. To me this sounds incredibly like the promises around zero hours contracts. It is entirely possible that this time the promise is sincere and what they mean to do is to create a specific NHS income tax to properly fund a service that is under massive strain from an aging population. It is just possible that the Conservatives have finally understood that the public don’t want to see large sections of it privatised and the whole service so badly underfunded that it is straining to cope. They may well have decided that it would be wonderful politics to outflank Labour and genuinely fix it with proper taxation driven finance.But remember those elections. David Cameron promised us an end to top down re-organisations of the NHS. He then launched the biggest top down unhelpful reform of it in history and that is one of the prime reasons the service is reeling under the pressure of so many managers spending so much time on responding to an endless stream of changes caused ultimately by government interference.It is every bit as possible that as soon as the next General Election is safely negotiated we will get a very different type of reform of NHS finances. One that privatises even more of the service and demands even more stupid “efficiency” savings.When it comes to the environment it is also wise to retain a degree of cynicism about the fine statements coming out of this government. Michael Gove is without question massively preferable to some the other Ministers the Conservatives have made ‘responsible’ for the environment. At least he says some of the right things and, much better, is actually doing some of them. It is genuinely helpful that he extended the ban on neonicitinoid use in the UK because those chemicals really are doing massive damage to insect life and will persist in the soil and rivers for decades. It is also genuinely helpful that he has committed himself to introduce a deposit return scheme on disposable drink packages and the like.Good common-sense measures like this are massively preferable to the sheer stupidity of the climate change denying speeches that came from some of his recent predecessors who claimed to be ‘responsible’ for the environment. The truth is, however, that Gove is going for relatively easy things to do that come with a lot of helpful publicity and not a lot of cost. Since the Chinese have refused to take any more of our rubbish shipments and there simply aren’t enough tips or incinerators available to deal with the consequent accumulations of our wasteful production and consumption methods no government could actually avoid taking serious and rapid action.Any genuine benefits from implementing these simple and necessary measures are being utterly dwarfed by policies that have the exact opposite impact on the environment. The supposedly greenest government ever is trying to bribe and bully local councils to accept fracking. Whilst they have stripped the power of planning committees to ban fracking they have acted in exactly the opposite direction when it comes to wind farms. It only takes one objector and the windfarm application has to be turned down regardless of any merits it might have. In other words they have effectively banned onshore wind farms.Then we have the risk to the environment that comes with Brexit. All these wonderful new free trade deals come at a price. It is inconceivable that the USA would sign a trade deal with the UK that would exclude their farmers. No US politician could risk doing that and Donald Trump isn’t exactly known for his understanding attitude to trade deals that help other nations. So we are going to get US food imported to the UK with much lower tariffs and with no conditions attached beyond a bit of window dressing. US farmers operate on a massively bigger industrial scale than UK farmers. They use more antibiotics. They battery farm cattle. Famously they also have to wash their chickens in chlorine in order to deal with the diseases they acquire in over crowded conditions.So UK farmers are going to get the choice of massively cutting their costs or going out of business under the pressure of competition from the US and New Zealand. Expect lower animal welfare standards. Expect heavier use of chemicals. Expect more destruction of hedgerows. Expect abandoned hill farms.Any good that Gove is achieving from his positive environmental policies will be massively exceeded by the harm he is doing by advocating Brexit. There is no green Brexit however right he may be about the fact that it is certainly very easy to design better schemes of agricultural subsidy than the Common Agricultural Policy.All of which entitles us to ask why Gove has suddenly become such a vocal advocate for the environment. Could it just possibly be that he recognises that he has become a touch unpopular after he lost his desperate self-interested bid to become Prime Minister? Could it be that he sees a few easy and cheap environmental actions as being a great way to restore some of that popularity? Could it just possibly be that losing an election for the leadership has forced him to take a different stance for a while?If you wish then in May there will be an excellent chance to express your confidence and trust in the honesty and sincerity with which the Conservatives can be relied upon to look after our public services and our environment. Alternatively you can let them know how completely you are fed up with their cynicism by voting Green. Now that’s what I call a land of opportunity. A real opportunity to get rid of this seriously untrustworthy government!

The thing about principles is that you are supposed to apply them equally regardless of whether they happen to be convenient. It is remarkable how many people seem to have difficulty with that when it comes to Israel and Palestine.I believe in national self-determination. That means that in current circumstances I fully accept the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace, freedom, security. I also believe in exactly the same thing for the Palestinian people.I also believe passionately in anti-racism. It would therefore never enter my head to be soft on anti-Semitism. Nor would it enter my head to be weak in calling out the actions of a government that didn’t treat all its citizens equally or which acted in an oppressive way towards people living in particular territories. I think that the state of Israel is guilty of exactly that. I also believe that there are plenty of Palestinian leaders who would act in exactly the same way if not worse if they had the power to do so and that their attitudes towards the rights of Jewish people is equally despicable and must be challenged every bit as strongly.One of the commonest mistakes that people on the left make is to fail to criticise leaders of national liberation struggles because it is perceived as undermining their fight. When those leaders get into power and proceed to act in appalling ways that leaves the left struggling to explain why they didn’t see the signs of the problem emerging. Sometimes, with astonishing naivety that failure to recognise horrible actions persists even when the former leaders of the national liberations struggle are sitting in comfortable offices inflicting their own oppressions. That is what happened with Mugabe and you can see much the same muddled thinking with regard to Syrian government from far too many people on the left. Just because someone uses the language of socialism doesn’t make their government socialist, equal, free or worthy of our support. It is possible to be against oppression coming from any government. We don’t have to be silent about the actions of the enemies of our enemies.Silence is even more unforgivable when it comes to remembering mass murder and deliberate attempts to wipe out another race. What happened to the Jewish people during the holocaust must never be forgotten. That doesn’t give the Jewish state the right to behave in racist ways towards other peoples and to steal land in the occupied territories. It also doesn’t give any other nation the right to try and wipe the state of Israel off the face of the earth. Importantly it also means that more than one holocaust needs to be remembered and the lessons learned. How many people in the state of Israel are taught properly about the number of “Gypsy” people who went into the ovens? The only difference between the experience of the two peoples is that one has a state to speak out for the memory of the huge loss whilst the deaths of the other race are routinely forgotten by all too many. There is something uniquely horrible about the sheer industrialisation of the Nazi murder machine but unfortunately there have been all too many other holocausts and all too many deniers. Burundi and Armenia come to mind and some of the actions of Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot are not so very different in scale of the horrors to what Hitler inflicted on the Jewish people.In the face of crimes of such enormity it is incumbent on each one of us to keep challenging ourselves to ensure that we are free of the kinds of thinking that led up to the Nazi death camps. The attitude that the rights of one people are somehow special and that other races are somehow of less worth than your own is where it all starts. That kind of thinking led many ordinary German people, and their accomplices from a whole series of other nations, to be able to usher young children into the showers where they were killed. It is entirely legitimate for Jewish people to challenge any of us and to test out whether we have any part of those attitudes within us. It is also entirely legitimate to challenge Jewish people to test out whether any of their attitudes towards Palestinians contain any of those dangerous seeds.Throwing accusations of anti-Semitism at anyone who raises that challenge when the Israeli state acts badly is not fair or reasonable or in the best long-term interests of the Jewish people. It cheapens and weakens the accusation.This means that it is perfectly legitimate for Jewish representatives to challenge Jeremy Corbyn and to test out whether he is in any way tolerating attitudes within his party that are anti-Semitic. For what it is worth I don’t think he has an anti-Semitic bone in his body and he has an excellent track record on anti-racism. I do, however, think that he has a tendency to be seriously muddled in his thinking about the leaders of peoples engaged in struggles against oppressive states. I believe that he sees many of the actions of the Israeli state as highly oppressive and racist in its treatment of Palestinian people. I think he is right about that. I don’t think he has been as good at recognising the shortcomings of the leaders of the Palestinian authorities. Being silent or turning a blind eye to bad behaviour on any side of a dispute is not acceptable so some degree of fair and balanced criticism of his stance is quite reasonable.That said, the campaign against him this week has been out of all proportion to any weaknesses in his thinking. To have clicked “like” on a comment about a photograph that he glanced at a couple of years back is not exactly a major thought crime. It is a piece of carelessness not a pattern of evil intent. If it is worthy of this degree of media criticism then an awful lot of us might have good cause to worry about which facebook pages we have accidently liked at some time in the past.It seems to me that it is entirely legitimate to ask questions of Jeremy Corbyn about how well he applies his principles of anti-racism and of championing the rights of all peoples to live in peace and freedom. I just wonder how many of those who are making that challenge with such enthusiasm pass the tests that they are setting to the same standard? Are his critics passionately challenging the oppression of peoples from all races? Or are they limiting their concerns to the experiences of only one?As I said at the start, the thing about principles is that they need to be applied equally regardless of whether they are convenient.

This week I read something truly alarming that really ought to be worrying us all immensely. The level of C02 emissions worldwide are going up not down[1].All the scientific evidence continues to be that high levels of C02 are a huge risk. The presence of C02 retains heat in the atmosphere and that has been proved again and again by verifiable scientific testing. It isn’t a matter of dispute it is a matter of physics and chemistry. C02 also dissolves in water to produce a mild acid. Coral reefs are made of alkaline material and are damaged by ocean acidification. That is a matter of chemistry and biology not of opinion.The globe is now at 407 parts of c02 per million and rising faster than ever. We know what is going wrong with absolute certainty and instead of reducing the problem we are making it worse. The rise in industrial production in India and China is the prime cause of this increase. So is the wider adoption of consumer lifestyles that require a lot of energy to keep them going.All of which would be very depressing if there were nothing we could do or it was hard to do anything to prevent the future damage. Fortunately, the exact opposite is true. The course of action we need to follow to change this situation is pretty clear and it is in our self interest as a nation to be one of the first to adapt to it. Our future success as a trading nation depends on being first to adopt new technology.Some of the more obvious measures we need to take are as follows:* Major investment in technology that cuts energy use such as insulation of homes, increased industrial efficiency, lower energy use consumer products.* Investment in increasing the efficiency of energy storage systems both at small scales via batteries and at larger scales to even out variations in supply & demand* Subsidising green energy production and ending government encouragement of oil and gas production and use* Fostering the electric vehicle businesses and encouraging use via insisting all new homes and supermarkets have electric car charging points and subsidising installation in existing premises and businesses* Switching freight off roads and onto railways via subsidies and incentives* Government support for research and development of efficient products and efficient production processes* Government support for companies to commercialise research ideas* Massive improvements in efforts to recycle and to reduce wasteful consumptionAs it happens you will find reference to some of these policies in the government’s Industrial Strategy. Just don’t try reading it too carefully. Because if you do then you’ll find that the strategy puts pathetically small amounts of propaganda money behind helpful measures and reserves its serious heavyweight policies for fracking, north sea oil, and new road schemes. This is the government that effectively banned all onshore wind farms by allowing one local objection to prevent development whilst offering bribes and overturning local decision making powers in order to encourage fracking. That makes it the bluest government ever not the greenest.The two major political parties get the idea that the public is worried about the environment. But they get it at the level of fearing that they will lose votes if they don’t say a few nice things whilst doing very little. They don’t remotely get the urgency of the need, the totality of the necessary technological transformation, the speed with which it will happen or the scale of the opportunity for the UK if it is ahead of the pack. China is investing billions in electric vehicle technology. The UK can’t even require new house builders to put a £20 charging point in the thousands of new homes that they are covering the countryside with.The problem is mainly an intellectual one. Every sensible person who has looked at the issue in any depth and with any degree of open mindedness knows we have a major problem on our hands. Every scientist worth their salt is telling us that we have to act and act quickly and that we might well have left it too late. We have record high temperatures in the arctic and continually reducing amounts of reflecting ice cover and greater amounts of darker open oceans. Yet when it comes to action there is a continued failure to understand the nature of the transformation in the economy that is required. Too many Conservatives don’t even understand the scale of the business opportunity and too many Labour politicians cave in whenever the interests of a trade union clash with those of the environment.It can be a long hard struggle to get the need for fundamental change understood. All too often the issue doesn’t even appear on the campaign trail if a Green isn’t standing. Yet we are in a struggle for our very survival that must be placed at the centre of all our decision making. That is why it is so important for an independent green view to be put before the electorate at every opportunity.

There has been some important new information about plastics published in the last couple of weeks. It turns out that if you want to spend money to buy your water in a plastic bottle then you are consuming an average of ten plastic particles per litre. These aren’t particularly small particles as they are wider than a human hair. No one knows the impact of them on human health. Or the effect of consuming plastic particles from milk or orange juice sold in Tetra Paks, or those we get from wrapping our food in plastic, or those that come via eating fish that have accidentally consumed micro plastics.We know that human male fertility is declining and there is a positive correlation with the spread of plastics. We know that cancer detection has increased steadily over the past 100 years and that once again that correlates with the spread of plastics. Correlation can, of course, be a deeply confusing way of identifying cause and effect. Better detection of cancer correlates with modern technology and so does the use of plastics. But the correlation does suggest that we might need to ask a rather important question. What impact is all the passive consumption of plastics that we experience having on our health?I suspect the answer to that question is going to prove very difficult and complex to tease out in the face of denials from the industry but I also suspect that it isn’t zero.We think that we know a lot more about the impact of plastics on the environment than we do about the impact on our health. After all there has been brilliant coverage on the BBC Blue Planet 2 programme of the extent of the spread across the planet of this persistent product. But even here there is an awful lot still to be learned. Some recent studies provided evidence that suggested that the vast majority of plastic pollution in the oceans came from less than ten rivers – all of them in the Third World. That suggested that wealthy nations are gradually cleaning up their acts and what we really have is a problem of poverty that will go away as more countries develop and get wise to the importance of tackling their pollution problem.That nice illusion went out of the window last week when we found out quite how much plastic there is in some British rivers. It turns out that when scientists looked carefully at the water in river systems around Manchester they found a higher concentration of plastic particles than had been found anywhere else in the world. Every stream bed had plastic particles in it, even those well up on the moors. After a flood event they discovered the amounts dropped by 70%. That sounds good but it isn’t. It means that the particles are washed out to sea and it also means that the river and stream beds are being regularly restocked with plastic particles or else previous floods would have cleaned up the problem. UK rivers are riddled with plastic particles and are spreading them around the world. That isn’t the end of our contribution to worldwide water pollution. We use a lot of pesticides and fertilizers in UK agriculture. We also use a lot of drugs and contraceptives that pass through our bodies and our animals and persist in the environment. The impact of neonicitinoids on bees has become notorious and is now under some small degree of control. These nerve agent insecticides penetrate every single part of the plant and when the plant dies and breaks down they persist in the soil and wash into hedgerows and streams. No one knows the impact of this on soil organisms or on river systems and no one has the faintest idea of how we could ever remove the poisons we have pumped out there. Yet many neonicitinoids remain legal.Our rivers aren’t just carrying microplastics down to the sea. They are carrying antibiotics, neonicitinoids, phosphates that produce toxic algal blooms, and a whole host of other goodies. Our cleaning products and our medicines are spreading every bit as relentlessly as the plastic mountain – we just can’t see the evidence as easily.At this point I need to be a touch careful. I am not arguing that we don’t need the benefits of modern science and modern technology and that we’d be better off without technological innovation. I believe the exact reverse. We owe a great deal of our long and more healthy lives to wonderful scientific work.What I believe is that we need to be moderate and sensible about how and where we use that technology and not allow ourselves to be seduced into giving up perfectly good alternatives because the marketplace is offering us options that look attractive but aren’t. This means:•Not feeding animals antibiotics routinely•Drinking tap water •Using a lot more glass and ceramics and a lot less plastic•Using greaseproof paper, cardboard trays, small paper bags and large jute ones instead of plastic packaging•Using washing powder not washing liquid from a plastic bottle•Wearing many more natural fibres and cutting out ones that shed huge numbers of plastic particles•Reducing unnecessary use of medicines and disposing of them carefully•Growing food with a lot more crop rotation and a lot less chemicals•Charging deposits on bottles and containers to encourage recycling•Investing in council waste plants & rewarding public efforts to use them instead of charging & encouraging fly tipping•Using soap instead of liquid dispensers and aerosol spraysThat is a list of a few perfectly practical measures which could be encouraged and incentivised very quickly by a genuinely green government and would begin to reduce the impact of our wasteful and thoughtless lifestyles without spoiling anyone’s enjoyment of life. We need to start right now on doing easy things like these to tackle the enormous challenge we face. We also need to start ramping up our investment in developing and bringing to the commercial market new low impact technologies and products so that we can tackle the more long term problems.It has taken us almost a century to develop a near total dependence on plastic and the habit of over using toxic chemicals. It might take us the best part of a century to move our technology and our lifestyles away from that dependence. Why would any government be satisfied to drag its feet and pass a few minor lip service measures in the face of such an enormous and urgent challenge?

For some time it has been hard to tell which of the two major political parties in Britain have the most implausible analysis of the economy post Brexit. The Conservatives keep telling us that they can create a business friendly Brexit and make the economy prosper. By losing tariff free access to our biggest market. The Labour party tells us that they can do the same thing via a jobs first loss of our major export market. Neither is facing up to the realities of the impact on jobs and businesses of leaving the EU. Both are more interested in following faith based policies than in identifying risks and opportunities and then working out how to minimise problems and genuinely take advantage of future economic trends like low plastic and low energy production and consumption.This week there was a big change. Instead of saying implausible and impractical things about Brexit the leaders of the two main parties starting saying implausible and impractical things about Putin’s Russia.May began by sounding quite plausible. She launched a good attack on the nature of Putin’s regime. It is bad enough that Putin’s opponents end up dead inside Russia. It is quite another when those opponents end up dead on the streets of Salisbury as a result of exposure to nerve toxins that aren’t widely available in the local Waitrose.Unfortunately, after May provided a pretty good criticism of Putin and his motives, she then proceeded to put forward an utterly pathetic set of actions in response. Expelling Russian diplomats a few days before Putin’s election isn’t exactly harming him. Rather it has exactly the opposite impact inside Russia. Most Russians actually admire Putin if he manages to organise a secret attack on the health of a traitor. Most Russians will be proud that the only thing the UK can do about it is to expel a few diplomats. Most Russians will be more likely to turn out and vote for Putin if they feel he is keeping Russia strong and proud. That is almost certainly why murder was attempted in the first place. A good stand off with the UK plays brilliantly to a Russian audience and Putin badly needed the extra turnout. Internal opposition has been bullied into defeat and crushed so completely that the election has become boring and that could result in a low turnout. Picking a fight with an old traditional external enemy is the ideal way to spice things up and get the voters out.May swallowed Putin’s bait, hook line and sinker. If she wanted to harm him she should have waited much more quietly until after his election campaign. Then she could have chosen to freeze regime assets squirrelled away in London. Something she wasn’t prepared to do because she has taken over £800,000 in campaign contributions from Russian exiles and it was just possible some of them might have been scared of a government seizing assets obtained by criminal activity.Even that would have only had a minimum impact. Because every year the West sends large quantities of money to Russia to buy oil, gas and natural resources. Long term the most effective way of harming Putin’s far right robber capitalist regime is simply to stop sending him money to buy his oil and gas. This is what funds his popularity. This is the money he uses to modernise his nuclear weapons. May should have massively ramped up the UK’s alternative energy programme and persuaded our allies to do the same.Without oil and gas funding the current way that the Russian economy is run has become utterly unsustainable. Putin has left Russia devoid of industrial competitiveness and weak in the service sector despite having inherited a fantastic education system and a very highly skilled population. The country is now living off extraction of minerals, ripping up virgin forests, and burning fossils. The sooner the world economy reduces its need for those fossils and those raw materials the sooner nasty far right leaders like Putin get exposed. Investing in a rapid move to free ourselves of an increasingly outdated technology is also a really good way to weaken a number of other even more unpleasant regimes. May’s Saudi Arabian friends come to mind.In other words, May spoke out strongly and clearly against Putin and then did all the things that Putin wanted her to do and none of the things that he didn’t. No one could fairly accuse Corbyn of making the same mistake. He didn’t even bother with the bit about speaking out effectively in the first place. If you wanted a master class in how muddled and confused late 70s socialist thinking could be then his speech would make a first-class study. Does Corbyn seriously think there will ever be rock solid proof about who carried out an espionage mission? Can he really not calculate who gains from the action of trying to kill a Russian dissident using weapons only a secret service would have access to?Incredibly there are still some people out there who think that Putin is running a regime that has something to do with the old Soviet Union and communism. Equally incredibly, given the millions of open minded people that Stalin sent off the camps, there are still people who think that the Soviet Union was some kind of socialist system with a few minor flaws. The truth is that Putin is a far right nationalist with almost identical politics to Donald Trump. The main differences is that Trump sacks anyone who shows the least sign of being a dissident whereas dissidents from Putin’s Russia have an unfortunate habit of ending up dead without anyone being able to prove who did it. Putin’s Russia operates on a form of robber capitalism where the state, private profit and criminal gangs intermix and ordinary citizens lose out.Instead of distancing himself from very outdated left thinking on Russia, Corbyn sounded like he couldn’t quite believe a nasty far right regime could have emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. It is one thing to be a strong peace campaigner. It is quite another to be weak and naïve about foreign aggression.I admire Corbyn’s stance on the Iraq war. He was one of the very few of us who stood out against it at the time. Opposing a bad war is never easy and you have to take a lot of very unpleasant accusations and face them down as you argue for the genuine long term interests of your country. It doesn’t help any of us to do this if we are seen to be utterly naïve and toothless against every act of aggression by a foreign power. Iraq didn’t involve an attack on a single inch of UK soil or a single citizen inside the UK and yet the vast majority of the Labour Party lined up behind Tony Blair to inflict decades of war and misery on that country. Russian dissidents have been dying mysteriously on the streets of Britain ever since Putin came to power and that does mean that a foreign power is committing atrocities on British soil. That is not something that the UK should turn a blind eye to.The leader of the Conservative Party proved good at talking big and doing nothing helpful. The leader of the Labour Party wasn’t even prepared to talk big and offered not a single practical policy to response to a series of state sponsored terror attacks on British soil. You pays your money and you makes your choice.Or better still you invest your money on modern fossil free technology and make a whole series of different and better choices so that you don’t end up powerless to resist the actions of horribly unpleasant oil states.

You hear some interesting things when a ruling party is describing the country’s finances. The Housing Minister Dominic Raab was put onto the radio this morning to tell us all that the UK economy was purring along with a “healthy hum” thanks to the Chancellor’s balanced approach.So that’s alright then. The deficit is coming down, unemployment is low and we really shouldn’t be worrying our little heads about the economy because the government has got it pretty well under control.It was about as plausible as listening to Gordon Brown telling us that he had put an end to boom and bust just before the world economy went through one of its biggest busts ever.The truth is that many ordinary people in this country are reeling as a result of ten years of misery that has been inflicted on them using the utterly flawed argument that the crash was caused by excessive government generosity. It wasn’t.As a matter of hard historical fact the crash began as a banking and financial crisis. It took place in the most extreme and least regulated part of the free market, where speculators were allowed to gamble with other people’s money. Northern Rock went bankrupt before there was a government deficit crisis. Lehman Brothers didn’t go bankrupt because the public sector was spending too much money but because it was being inadequately regulated by the public sector.Instead of properly tackling the excesses of gambling capitalism the Conservatives have repeated endlessly the factual error that it was public sector debt that was responsible for this crisis and it is the public sector that must take the brunt of the pain in solving it. Whilst £400 billion has gone on quantitative easing local government spending in real terms has been slashed to around half its former size in real terms. That means fewer care workers to look after the elderly or infirm and more people blocking hospital beds because there is no one to look after them.Teachers, doctors, nurses and care workers have all had their pay cut in real terms every year throughout the austerity campaign. Bankers and financiers haven’t paid the same price despite being the direct cause of our major problems. Almost every person in receipt of benefits has experienced serious reductions in their drastically small income and a nasty increase in aggressive treatment by bureaucrats. Meanwhile major international companies have got away with paying less tax than small high street businesses because they use avoidance schemes that could be stopped tomorrow with a punitive estimate rule based on sales in UK.These kinds of contrasts are obscene. Those who carry no blame for the ten years of austerity must pay the price. Those who directly caused it are back to business as usual with the same horrible risks of yet another crash.At the top of the boom cycle and after ten years of pain the Chancellor and his spin doctors are telling us to rejoice over the healthy hum of the economy. Real wages are down yet again and haven’t equally the pre-crash levels. Zero hours contracts and false self employment have devastated job security. Savers have seen the value of what they own reduce every year since the crash as ultra-low interest rates fail to properly stimulate investment.These are not the symptoms of a healthy economy. They are the signs that enough sticking plaster has been put over the problem of an insecure world economy to lurch on for a bit longer. You cannot have a successful global economy without effective global economic management. Only really well organised international collaboration can bring an unstable economic system back to some kind of health. More importantly only really well organised international collaboration can bring an unstable environmental crisis safely under control.In these circumstances the government’s economic plan is simply inadequate to face up to the challenge. Smugness is not a responsible economic strategy. Lip service is not a responsible way to tackle a huge environmental crisis. Cobbling together a few random ideas like fracking, HS2 and Hinkley Point and calling it an Industrial Strategy is not a responsible way to rebalance the UK economy and get us at the forefront of the next wave of technology. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, losing customs free access to your biggest market in order to patch up a split in your political party is not a responsible way to secure your country’s future prosperity.The Conservatives used to pride themselves on their economic competence. They have kept the pride and turned it into acute smugness. Any competence they might once have had has long gone.

​Labour’s position on Brexit has become much clearer in the last couple of weeks. It is now clearly a dangerously confused mess. Facing a government that has adopted a policy that can’t possibly work and is therefore desperately easy to attack, Corbyn has come up with a novel approach. He has adopted the same fantasies with different ends. I admire many of those ends. But a weak and deluded strategy is not the best way of getting them.Let me try and explain by quoting from his speech to the Scottish Party Conference last week. It shouldn’t be necessary to quote him so heavily but so many progressives are refusing to listen to what he has actually said and preferring to believe that he is actually anti Brexit or wanting a very mild Brexit. His actual position is based on naïve hopes that no progressive would allow Theresa May to get away with. Consider the following:“we will not accept an off the peg model for our future relationship with the EU .. we must find our own model that works for everybody in the UK.”That is identical to May’s position and on the face of it might seem fair enough. So might his next statement:“we would seek to negotiate a new customs union with the EU after Brexit to ensure that there are no tariffs with Europe and help avoid any need for a hard border in Northern Ireland”Once again at first sight there is nothing much to disagree with. An admirable ambition. Then he went on to outline his expectations of how this would all work:“the option of a new UK customs union with the EU would need to ensure that the UK has a say in future trade deals. Labour would not countenance a deal that left Britain as a passive recipient of rules decided elsewhere by others.”Here we begin to encounter really serious problems. That is exactly what the EU has said can never be on offer from the very first day. If they offer that then they abolish the EU, because a country outside the EU would get all of the benefits of membership without having to follow the rules. The fantasy that this can be achieved is identical to the illusion that May is currently peddling hard in a desperate attempt to unite her party. If anyone out there can find a single speech by any of the EU negotiators saying that such a deal can ever remotely be on the cards then this policy might make sense. In the absence of that it leads us gradually into leaving the Single Market and a jobs lost Brexit.Corbyn’s speech doesn’t end there. He goes on to say that “we would want to negotiate protections or exemptions where necessary from current rules and directives that push privatisation and public service competition or restrict our ability to intervene to support domestic and local industry and business or undermine attempts to protect rights at work”Rarely have I read a more confused jumble of correct and incorrect assertions. There are no rules in the EU that push privatisation. Indeed, several of the UK’s supposedly privatised industries like rail are actually run by nationalised companies run by the French or German state. The situation is the exact opposite. Outside the EU we would need new trade deals. Those trade deals all come with international courts of arbitration. That means corporate lawyers telling the UK government what it is allowed to do. So the risk of a future government signing up to a trade deal that allows US health companies to bid for the easy bits of NHS work are much greater outside the EU. Unless you believe that Labour will be in power for ever and the Conservatives wouldn’t rush to sign a TTIP style deal the day they next get back in.Much the same applies to the statement that Corbyn would need to avoid the EU undermining UK rights at work. Once again the reality is the exact opposite. The EU single market is big enough for the members of it to be able to insist that no one falls below certain levels of rights and that everyone keeps above certain minimum standards. There is not a single word in EU law requiring a member government to lower those rights. Any member can exceed them at their will. Leaving the EU doesn’t open up a glorious opportunity to abolish zero hours contracts. The British government has always had the power to do that but lacked the will under both Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments. Leave the EU and the Rees Moggs of this world are free to lower standards to their hearts content. Provided they haven’t signed up to the Single Market and all its requirements. A Corbyn government might protect & improve those standards but sooner or later a Conservative government would be free to race us to the bottom.The one correct part of Corbyn’s statement is that the EU does restrict measures to intervene on behalf of UK industries. Sensibly there are rules that prevent one member nation subsidising its products in order to sell more cheaply to the EU than any of its competitors. That rule has existed since right back to the days when the EU was beginning life as an iron, steel and coal customs deal. The EU cannot possibly agree to change it. What is possible inside the EU is to offer sensible support to universities to research new products and several forms of more sophisticated help for firms to do things like cutting their costs by reducing their consumption of energy. We can do that and more already from inside the EU. So a progressive industrial strategy is perfectly possible as an EU member. In what world is the EU ever going to allow the UK to subsidise its industries more directly and then export those subsidised products tariff free to the EU?This means that Corbyn either has to dump a major plank of his policy – subsidies to tradition trade union dominated heavy industry. Or else he has to take us out of the single market and we get all the customs paperwork and charges and the Northern Ireland border disputes that most progressives hate.The final thing he had to say last week in Scotland was the very sensible statement that “the UK could not accept a situation where we are subject to all EU rules and EU law, yet had no say in making those laws. That would leave us as mere rule-takers and isn’t a tenable position for democracy”. Unfortunately, that is exactly where his policies lead us. Either we accept EU rules but have no say or we are outside the single market and into a jobs wrecked Brexit.At this point I need to restate that I like a lot of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies and I would prefer Labour to win the next election than the Conservatives. I don’t, however, see why that preference requires me to be silent about those of his policies that are leading us to disaster. Many in the Labour party have been telling progressives from every other party to stand aside, vote Labour and stop voicing honest criticism because beating the Tories is so important. Even if you disagree with every word of criticism I’ve made of Corbyn’s Brexit strategy it should be clear that there is a progressive case to be made that it is wrongheaded and a very large number of honest people think it is better to go for a simple strategy of campaigning for a second referendum and Remaining. A policy that has been adopted by the Greens, the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid, SDLP and Sinn Fein.Every other progressive party in the country is campaigning to stay the EU in as the only realistic option. It would be good if Labour could listen and learn but if they persist with believing in fantasies that lead inevitably to a hard Brexit then the very least they need to understand is that none of the other progressive parties can possibly meekly stand aside and back something they think is so fundamentally damaging. The days when there was one party which was the one monolithic correct interpreter of the needs of the working classes ought to be long gone. Time for Labour to accept PR and to offer a genuine progressive alliance instead of insisting we all must line up behind flawed policies.

Honesty can be a very unpopular policy. Especially when it clashes with self-interest.Any honest person would quickly admit that Saudi Arabia is a horrible women-hating regime where ordinary citizens who dares to voice criticism are beheaded or lashed. For decades it has been the prime source of funds for religious extremism across the world and right now it is responsible for a great deal of death and destruction in the Yemen.A cynic would say that they buy our arms and we need the money. That same cynic would say that the Western World currently runs off oil and they are a reliable source of it.This week it hasn’t been hard to decide which side of the fence Theresa May sits. She knows where her bread is buttered and is mouthing a whole series of platitudes that are just not true. Reform isn’t encouraged by selling a nasty regime weapons that it can use to control its citizens. Bad wars aren’t brought to a positive end by selling boatloads of armaments to one of the more violent protagonists. Women’s rights aren’t secured by praising a small elite of ‘royal’ men for permitting a few women to drive and to sit in the cinema provided that they are firmly segregated.The position of Labour in opposition has been more impressive. Corbyn has asked some excellent questions about why we are rolling out the red carpet to welcome a dictator, mass murderer and oil sheik. It will be interesting to see how strongly that criticism is sustained if Labour returns to power and comes under pressure from trade unions to shut up and protect members jobs. In the past their Prime Ministers have done exactly the same as May and ethical foreign policy has lost out to a focus on jobs.Yet, if you really want a master class in dishonesty, the place to go is Putin’s Russia. He is in the run up to his election campaign. So it is in his interests to do two things. The first is to intimidate his opposition and make their life as hard for it as possible. The second is to present himself as the only strong and stable choice and the best defender of Russian national interests against a hostile world.That is why opposition leaders with any influence within Russia had to either be arrested and accused of corruption or had to meet with an accident. Boris Nemtsov was a former Deputy Prime Minister who had a reputation within the country for honesty. He ended up dead on a bridge in Moscow in 2015. It has proven curiously difficult to trace the killers. Other opposition leaders have proven rather more fortunate. They have just spent time in jail on trumped up corruption charges that were sufficient to finish them off as a serious political alternative and then banned from standing. That’s what happened to Alexei Navalny. As a consequence the only people appearing on the ballot paper against Putin are going to be unpopular nonentities that have been allowed to stand to help maintain an illusion of choice.Retaining and using power is also the reason why Putin has backed Assad in Syria despite significant internal dislike of the body bags that have been coming home from the war. Putin has calculated that there are more people who will be pleased to see their country winning a war than there are grieving mothers who know where to place the blame. He has also, calculated that taking territory occupied by Russian speakers from Ukraine by force plays very well with a Russian audience. Especially when it is so very obvious that the West has been powerless to do anything meaningful to stop him. Then there is his enthusiasm for huge set piece sporting events taking place on Russian soil. If you want to cheer up an electorate then there is a very long tradition amongst cynical politicians for staging games.All of this is also the overwhelmingly likely reason for the poisoning of two Russians in England this week. We will never know for certain who did this and there is a queue of regime supporters telling us that it is nothing to do with Russia. The most extreme example of a bare faced lie was when the killer of Litvinenko came on the TV to tell us that Skripal probably did it to himself or had a heart attack. A rare example of father and daughter trying to commit suicide on a public street or sharing the exact same moment to have a heart attack.The only way we will ever get to the truth behind Skripal’s killer is to ask the question: who benefits? The answer to that is simple. Putin looks very good inside Russia if it is known that he is able to kill traitors even if they are living in Britain. It sends the perfect message for him. It shows just how strong he has become and how long the reach of his punishment can be. No one gains more than him. Indeed, he is probably the only person in the world whose reputation internally would improve if this action was directly traced to him. Inside Russia this poisoning is viewed in almost exactly the same light that Britain would have looked on it if we had poisoned Kim Philby in Moscow.In these circumstances there are a lot of hot headed people who are telling us that the UK must strengthen its armed forces and build better Trident missiles in order to stop Putin. That plays right into Putin’s hands. He needs the narrative that he is surrounded on all sides by enemies. There is no amount of spending on the defence budget that would enable Britain to win a conventional war in the east of Ukraine even with the aid of the US. There is no way that the UK can unseat Putin by building nuclear weapons. We just help him with his own bombastic posturing and give him an easy justification for wasting billions of oil money on better mass destruction. So we might as well use our money more wisely.There is one very clear way to remove any realistic threat from Putin’s Russia. It just happens to be exactly the same thing that will also remove much of the threat from Saudi religious extremism. We can cut the amount of money we send them to buy oil and gas as quickly and as comprehensively as possible.The single most effective way of reducing the threat of terrorism and the threat of a resurgence of Russian dictatorship is to invest in alternative sources of energy and energy conservation and storage. You won’t hear that policy coming from the mouth of UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. But it is the honest truth.

​Bad weather always generates a crop of really daft news stories. These last couple of weeks have been no exception. Plenty of people have had a real go at confusing a quite normal weather variation with a climatic change. The truth is it is rarely possible to learn much about climate from a couple of weeks weather data no matter how extreme.But what is happening at the moment in the artic seems rather different. The world’s most northerly land based weather station is at Cape Morris Jessup in Eastern Greenland. It has recorded temperatures above zero in February only three times in the last 20 years. The years are 2011, 2017 and 2018. This year the temperatures are averaging 15 degrees centigrade above the normal average. That looks more like a trend and less like a short term blip.It is possible, of course, that worrying about this is unnecessary and we’ll flip back into a cold decade. It is also possible that the central forecasts of the scientific community are right and that all we are seeing is a sign of a gradual warming process that we can just about get on top of in time to avoid a drastic change if we pull out all the stops.What worries me is that there is a third possibility that is actually a lot more plausible than the idea that climate change is all a scare story. The little discussed third possibility is that climate change is happening a lot faster than any of the careful objective scientists dared to predict under severe challenge.We know as a matter of scientific fact that CO2 levels are now at 407 ppm and rising. This is well above the highest level that has existed since humans have been on the planet and extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is scientifically certain to create extra warming. We know that artic ice levels keep breaking records for the lowest levels ever witnessed and that is an unavoidable scientific fact that white ice reflects heat and open water absorbs more of it. We know there is a lot of methane both frozen under the ocean and frozen on land in permafrost and that this is a much more dangerous greenhouse gas. We don’t really know for certain how much of it will be released or how quickly as global temperatures rise. What if all those factors cause climate to change more rapidly than the more sober forecasts have led us to expect? Greenland is a rather worrying place to find evidence of warming happening more rapidly than predictions. Melt sea ice and you don’t change sea levels. Melt significant amounts of the Greenland Ice Shelf and we lose the following cities: New York, New Orleans, London, Shanghai, St Petersburg, Venice. We also lose much of Bangladesh and the fertile parts of Egypt.If there is even a remote possibility that we might be about to trigger such enormous damage then it really ought to persuade even the most cautious person to press for speedier action to limit the risk. The possibility looks less remote with every passing year.There are, of course, some grounds for optimism. The weight of money that the Paris accords have put behind research and development of alternative energy generation, energy conservation, energy storage and low energy products is creating a huge momentum. It is entirely possible that technology has reached a tipping point and we are going to move in a much more sustainable direction with real speed and enthusiasm. Low energy approaches are becoming cheaper and more efficient more rapidly than predicted and the volume of sales is bringing prices down and encouraging even more rapid technological development in a virtuous circle.Unfortunately, the fossilised ways of the past don’t end easily. There are a lot of vested interests in the old ways of doing things. Donald Trump, President Putin and reactionary oil states like Saudi Arabia are not exactly promoting an enlightened embrace of urgent change. We are in a battle between the new technology and the old and there is no guarantee that it will be won quickly enough to avoid catastrophic long term damage to the climate taking place.In these circumstances there is not much doubt about what would be the morally correct choice for a British government to take about its investment policies, its industrial strategy and its political allies. There also ought to be little doubt about what would be the choice that would give the country the most successful economic future. No country ever prospered by linking its fate to a declining technology.Yet the UK government continues with its policy of making nice soundbite announcements on environmental issues but putting all its serious energies in the wrong direction. It is busy welcoming Saudi Arabian royalty for a state visit. It has incentivised fracking. It has given tax incentives to North Sea Oil and Gas exploration. It has all but banned onshore wind farm developments. Then it has tried to generate a few positive headlines by trying to promote the use of electric cars. The bulk of its money has gone firmly behind old technology. A few hundred million is going into the future.It is impossible to detail the extent of the failure so I’m going to stick to one area of policy. The UK is in the middle of a home building boom. It ought to be a perfect opportunity to redesign a significant part of our housing stock and to embrace the future. That just isn’t happening:

There is no requirement for new homes to generate as much electricity as they use so they won’t be equipped with solar panels or heat exchange systems as standard.

There is no requirement for them to have electric car charging points so there won’t be a quick cheap and easy boost to the number of people owning one.

There is pathetically little financial support for universities to research and develop new products like graphene heaters or insulating paintwork and even less help to develop such products commercially in the UK and bring them to global markets. So the new homes won’t be equipped with the latest technology and UK industry won’t get a shot in the arm to help it develop.

New homes will not be equipped with electricity storage facilities as standard. So the UK will need greater energy production capacity than it really needs because we are missing out on opportunities to even out demand

That monumental failure to seize on an opportunity is echoed again and again. There are virtually no meaningful grants now available to help owners of old homes to improve on their insulation or to benefit from the latest technology. We have a government that likes to tell us loudly and often how strongly committed it is to green policies but is extraordinarily reluctant to offer any actual financial incentives. That is not because of shortage of money. It is because it has chosen to use the money that it does have at its disposal the wrong way. It is fostering the old ways not the new. This government doesn’t seem to understands the scale of the challenge, the need for urgency in action or even the speed at which other countries are responding to new needs.There is a real risk of the world not acting rapidly enough in order to tackle climate change. But there is also a real change underway to a more sustainable economic model. It is hugely worrying that the current UK government is not dong remotely enough to embrace the change.

Freedom of choice for the individual is usually something I am very keen to support. State control over the lives of individuals much less so. Even when a government claims to be acting on behalf of the poorest in society and with the best of intentions it is usually wise to be very suspicious of what it does when it starts to interfere with the choices people make in their lives. It rarely ends well. As we know from Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and recent events in Venezuela. As well, of course, as from Hitler’s Germany and Pinochet’s Chile.But there are times when it is wise and necessary for the whole of society to take a view about the decisions that individuals are making even when those decisions concern a child’s upbringing. That is exactly what we should be doing about segregated religious education that denies a child access to scientific knowledge and alternative visions of the world and simply exposes that child to whatever beliefs the parents hold. Propaganda is dangerous regardless of whether it comes from the state or from your own parents.It is therefore deeply disturbing that Ofsted has reported a surge in the number of unlicensed religious schools in the UK. More and more parents are choosing to take their children away from any risk of being exposed to views that differ from their own and instead are putting them into establishments that are firmly instructing them in the orthodoxy of their choice. This applies to some Muslim schools, some Jewish ones, and to some extreme Christian sects.The damage that this type of schooling can do to the individual is considerable as they are brought up to view the world as us and them. Either you sign up to the whole package of beliefs favoured by your parents and their religious community or you face complete ostracization from everyone in your family, your religious leaders and every friend you ever made at school. That is not exactly providing a child with a free choice or a proper education. Especially when some of the beliefs being propagated are as bizarre as the idea that the world is only a few thousand years old – a view which appears nowhere in the bible or any other major religious text and is simply a flawed calculation made by one biblical scholar a couple of centuries ago.The damage to society is every bit as significant. In a complex and rapidly changing world in which people have to live alongside others with very different views it does immense harm to social cohesion to have whole groups of children brought up to believe that their own views are the religiously established truth and all other views are dangerously flawed. A multicultural society needs better mutual understanding not propaganda being fed to the youngest and most vulnerable.It is, of course, illegal to withdraw a child from the school system and impose a programme of organised religious propaganda onto that child. Home education for an individual is meant to be supervised to ensure that it provides that child with a reasonable and balanced education and it is illegal to set up a school that isn’t subject to proper checks and inspections. That law has been in place for over a hundred years and is there to protect the safety of the child in every regard. It is there to protect from child abuse, physical cruelty, poor and insanitary conditions and also deliberate bias.Unfortunately the law is not being applied and it was written before Ofsted was invented. The school inspectors therefore find themselves in the ludicrous position of knowing that dodgy schools exist but not being able to close them down. We badly need a change in the law to ensure that Ofsted can go into any establishment without notice and check what is being done to the country’s children.Yet, incredibly, the risk of religious intolerance being inflicted on our children doesn’t end with illegal schools set up with the deliberate intention of flouting the law. Across the country new Free Schools are being set up and some of these have a very determined focus on religion and have been set up by groups of parents with the prime purpose of ensuring the children from “their” community are brought up to be good Muslims, good Jews, or good evangelicals. There is also large network of long established faith schools. Many of these establishments provide an excellent and well-rounded education where children are made aware of a variety of different views and scientific knowledge is respected. Some of the others don’t. Northern Ireland has suffered for decades from a system of education that makes it very clear from an early age which community you belong to. The divisions may be less violent at the moment but the boundaries between the two communities are very clear because of divisions that are strongly re-enforced by an education system that defines a child as being Catholic or Protestant rather than part of a single mixed community.Is that the kind of direction that we want education to go in across the whole of the UK? Do we want to strengthen and re-enforce divisions or do we wish to move beyond them and promote understanding? Do we want to only view some children as part of “The” community or all children as part of our communities?Those of us who believe in the open minded pursuit of knowledge and an education based on tolerance and understanding have a battle on our hands. Gradually that tolerant society is being worn away by a increase in tribalist determination to avoid children mixing outside their normal social groups. That is something which needs to be fiercely resisted. Sometimes a tolerant society has to be very intolerant of intolerance.